One-Hundred Percent Humidity by Michelle Lyn King, 2023
The magic trick:
A typically heightened teenage story that goes in a surprising (and depressing) emotional direction
The Recommended Reading magazine portion of Electric Literature dot com is not to be taken for granted. What a gift it is to those fans of short stories. A new story every week, free, online, and placed within an interesting context by another talented writer or staffer.
Sadly, I don’t have as much time as I’d like to keep up with it weekly, so I love that they do a “Most popular Recommended Reading stories of the year” article every December.
So this weekend on SSMT I’m going to highlight the top two stories from the 2023 list. A warning: they’re not exactly easy reads. The subject matter in most cases is fairly graphic and more-than-a-little troubling. But we’d expect nothing less from short stories, right?
Up first, the most-read RR story of the year: “One-Hundred Percent Humidity,” by Michelle Lyn King. It takes its place alongside other recent, superb stories of female narrators pressed into sexual situations that they’re supposed to desire and in fact don’t at all enjoy. I’m thinking especially of “You Never Get It Back” by Cara Blue Adams and the now era-defining “Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian.
These are stories that were written for decades through the male gaze in a way that either assumed the woman was thrilled with the situation or simply didn’t note the woman’s point of view at all. It’s a little startling – especially as a male – to see how such a seemingly basic concession could still be so revolutionary.
“One-Hundred Percent Humidity” is perhaps even more harrowing than the aforementioned examples too, because its protagonist is still in high school. And as such, it sets up as a familiar teenage melodrama. The first-person narrator is avoiding her dad and his new girlfriend for a few days after Christmas, hanging out instead at her friend’s house. Her problems are classic teenage stuff for the most part – a mean girl best friend who isn’t the best influence; a crush on a boy who has a girlfriend; experimenting with ideas about sex, alcohol, and drugs; bullying at school. The people around her strike her as so cool and so beautiful.
It’s all predictably heightened in our narrator’s thoughts.
The twist is what happens when the story’s events ratchet up to the point where the reality our narrator is experiencing is in fact even more dramatic than her thoughts and fears. Instead of finding thrill or relief or any kind of heightened emotion to match this heightened experience, she simply fades into numbness. It all just barely registers. The people aren’t beautiful. They have bad breath and crooked teeth. They’re dumb. The things they do are mean and pointless.
It’s a haunting comedown to nothing. It’d almost be easier to read if she were simply hurt. Instead, this feels like not just a one-off bad night. It seems like the start of a dark clarity about life.
And that’s quite a trick on Hall’s part.
The selection:
It was Callie’s idea for me to stay with her. We talk about it like it’ll be forever. She tells me her dad won’t mind. The man Callie calls her dad isn’t her dad at all, but a guy named Harry that her mom’s been dating for the last three years. Callie says she’s never had a one-on-one conversation with him.
It was Callie’s idea to invite Tripp and Danny over while her mom and Harry were on vacation down in Key Largo. It was Callie’s idea to steal 60 dollars from a drawer in Harry’s office and it was Callie’s idea to use the money to buy a fat bottle of Grey Goose from the drive-thru liquor store that doesn’t card. It was Callie’s idea to raid her mom’s closet for her Gucci belt and heavy gold jewelry. Everything we ever do is Callie’s idea.
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